Looking into What Big Data Can and Cannot Do: A Hypothesis

The term ‘Big Data‘ was coined way back in 1940s and many companies around the world have put in lot of efforts in order to explore its full potential and the global giants have invested significant amount of their fortunes in order to leverage the full potential of big data technologies.

For companies Big Data is a ray of hope as it enables them to make use of any size of information collected from our computers, handhelds, GPS etc. The bits collected are no longer useless and the more they collect these bits the more insights companies are able to derive about their customers and services.

In spite of all the benefits of the big data many people fail to see what Big Data Management can do and what it cannot do.

Big Data is capable but at times it is crippled too and it is hard to believe that such a technology has flaws.Things Big Data is Capable of1. Diagnostic analysis
Instinctively or intellectually we do this every day. Once an event occurs we are interested in finding it trigger i.e. what actually was the force behind the event. For example there was a flood in the region A and we have all the parameter of region A such as temperature, atmospheric pressure etc. If we are able to relate all these factors to the cause of the flood then in future one will be to warn the people before hand and this is the power of Big Data.

2. Prediction Analysis
We also do this on our daily basis and in fact this something which is in the DNA of humans. If we have a chain of restaurants and we need to find which of these restaurants will not be able to meet their target sale. And, if we are able to find them then we can focus our attention on these hotels.

3. Finding relation between unknown elements and events
Let us assume that number of employees has no relation with the sales. So, one can cut the number of employees if cutting does not lead to any other loos or any drop in performance.

4. Prescription analysis
This type of analysis is actually the future of the analytics. If we are trying to predict any terrorist attack in a popular tourist place and a strategy to evacuate the people safely in such case. In order to make this prediction correctly we need make certain other predictions such as number of tourists in that particular location and then predicting the areas which can be affected by the blasts etc.Things Big Data is not capable of1. Predicting definitive future
At the very best we can touch the scale in 90s when it comes to accuracy in predicting future using sophisticated tools and whatever the case may be 100 percent accuracy is not possible.

2. Finding a creative solution to a business problem
Creativity is a patent of human being and will always remain. No matter how intelligent and advance systems we create intelligent cannot be taught and certainly cannot be coded using algorithms.

3. Finding solution to a problem which is not well defined
Shaping an analytic problem from a given business problem is something that only humans can do and any machine and any algorithm cannot take this away from you.

4. Management of Data
Data management is very important as with growing data it is becoming tedious to manage the data and with so many types of data with different data structures the task becomes even more challenging.

There are something’s which can be taught to machine and there are other things which only humans have been bestowed with and cannot be taught in terms of coding and algorithms. The best possibility is for humans and machines to work together.